Mother and Son
by maryh10000
Summary: One shots about Madame Christmas and Roy Mustang. Spoilers. Mostly from the fma fic contest so far.
1. The Bodyguard

**The Bodyguard**

People imagine she was a beauty when she was younger. Chris smirks, the same trademark expression she passed on to her son. The truth is, she's built like a linebacker now (though much of the muscle has gone to fat) and she was built like a linebacker back then. It was a status symbol for the high-class hostess club, training ground for the leftover girls hoping to become a rich man's mistress, to have female body guards. "Look at us," it proclaimed. "Your purchase remains untouched until you make your selection."

No one pays attention to the bodyguard. When someone did, Chris fell for it and ended up dumped and pregnant. The price of her government-paid C-section was a hysterectomy.

She made up a brother and sister-in-law to explain the boy's last name. For someone of her class, women dead in childbirth and men killed in action were a dime a dozen. Incomplete records were too. Everyone thought her Roy-boy was a proper gentleman from properly married parents and he was shooting up through the ranks like a rising star.

Madame Christmas wasn't invisible any more. She was the hard-headed proprietress of the highest class hostess bar in Amestris and foster mother to the ambitious Flame Alchemist himself. But Roy's mother was and always would be.

* * *

Written for fma fic contest prompt 197, Invisible.


	2. Tears & Cuts

**Tears and Cuts**

The first tear was when Roy lost his parents. That was long ago and he had been so young that there was hardly a mark from that. That wound had closed, seamless as a scratch on a baby.

The next tear, actually a cut, came when he left Central City to apprentice with Master Hawkeye in the East. Roy's mother had raised him to be a gentleman, like the cultured men who engaged her hostesses for their beauty and their wit and their talent. She had made a trip out to Hawkeye Manor and viewed the decrepit building as well as the hick town it was embedded in. But Roy had insisted on that particular Master and gone against her express wishes for the first time since he was a small boy. That cut he made himself and the seam that closed it bound him back to his mother in a different but stronger way, reshaping him.

The next cut, two actually, he also made himself when he joined the military. The one with his mother closed in another strong seam, but the cut with his Master never did, staying open and fraying.

But the next cut became a tear that ripped through all of the seams that bound and shaped him. It began when Roy followed his orders in Ishval and tore out of control over his time there.

Years later, he was still repairing the damaged seams and the tears and the ragged edges it had left.

* * *

Author's Note:

Submitted for Prompt 99, Seamless, at fma_fic_contest.


	3. Auntie

**Auntie**

When Roy came home from school, he passed Chris in the kitchen without even saying "hello". That wasn't usual for the talkative teenager, or at least it hadn't been until recently. Usually he'd sit at the kitchen table and have a snack while Chris had her breakfast. Her shift as security at the bar was from 8pm to 4am and she slept from 7am to 3pm, when he got home from school.

He'd eat and page through his schoolbooks, sometimes telling her something he thought was interesting. She'd never seen a boy like him for the books. Sometimes he'd let drop something that had happened at school. But lately, he bypassed the kitchen and his snack to hole up in his room. She was starting to worry.

She went to his room and knocked on the door. "Roy-boy!" she called.

"Don't call me that," sounded the irate voice from behind the door. "How many times do I have to tell you?"

"Get decent if you aren't. I'm coming in," she said.

He glowered at her from his messily made bed, which was where he had spread out his schoolbooks instead of his usual place at the kitchen table. "Yes, auntie?" he asked, with a slight ironic stress on the auntie, as if he could hardly bear her presence.

That was another new thing. He'd called her "mum" from the beginning although, from the beginning, he'd also heard people and she herself, call her his foster mum or his aunt. Now, suddenly, she had stopped being "mum". She'd thought it was cute when at the grand old age of eight he'd decided he was too old to say "mummy" and graduated to "mum." But there was something more ominous about this change.

"What's with you?" she asked, leaning against the doorframe, a cigarette in her right hand and her left hand on her hip. "You suddenly act like I got the plague or somethin'."

"You know, I always figured I got my eyes and my smallness from my sweet Eastern mum. You know, the little slip of a thing my dad married? Guess I must have gotten it from Dad after all. My mum isn't small or Eastern."

"I see. You found out."

"Did you even know his name?" he bit out. "Or do you even know which one it was? 'Be a gentleman like your pa', you always told me. Was he a gentleman?"

"I thought he was at the time," she answered with a twisted smile. "I was wrong."

"When were you going to tell me?" Roy demanded. "Or were you ever going to tell me at all? Anything else you haven't gotten around to telling me yet?"

"If you're looking for an apology, Roy, you're not getting one," Chris snapped. "I did what I thought was best. It's tough enough growing up in this place without a father. You didn't need to be a bastard too."

A sharp little laugh. "I am though, apparently," he said. "I get called that at school sometimes, but I don't think it's because anyone thinks it's literally true. You did a good job of covering your tracks, auntie."

"And you did a good job of uncovering them," Chris said. She was going to prod for more information, but Roy changed the subject.

"So mum, what about my apprenticeship with old Master Hawkeye?" he asked. "I really don't think I can do any better than him." It was his normal voice, not the dark, glowering voice he'd been using just a moment ago. It took her off guard.

"Knowing you, you've done your research," she said. "But I didn't like what I saw out there. And it's in the middle of nowhere. You're not a country boy."

He nodded respectfully, looking at her with that open face she'd been missing. "I know mum," he said. "But he really is the best for what I want to learn."

"Oh, all right Roy-boy," she said. "On one condition."

"What is it?" and when he smiled at her, seeming to promise anything, she melted.

"You come back here to the kitchen table with me," she said gruffly.

When he got there with his books, he with his snack, she finishing her breakfast, it seemed almost that things had gone back to the way they were before. But they hadn't. He gradually switched out "mum" for "auntie." And when the school year was over, he left home altogether, first for Master Hawkeye and then for the military.

Later, she would wonder whether the whole scene about finding out she really was his mother had been calculated to soften her up about the apprenticeship.

But he never complained about being called "Roy-boy" again.

* * *

**Author's Note**

Submitted to fma_fic_contest under the title of "Changes" for Prompt 110: Switch.


End file.
